Hello friends. I'm Yuan Lai from New Distribution. Recently, I visited over a dozen distributor owners. As the year ends, it's a time for review and summary. From our discussions, I gained many insights and thoughts, which I'd like to share with you. 1. Many mainstream distributors still have a "working for the brand" mentality, focusing on achieving brand sales targets. For businesses with tens of millions or even hundreds of millions in revenue, 80% comes from three or four brands. To meet the brand's assigned targets and earn rebate policies, they constantly seek various business opportunities: wholesale, group buying, diverting goods, supermarket promotions, etc. 2. We've always emphasized that a distributor's core competitiveness is not the brand resources you represent or your ability to shoulder the tasks set by brands. Brand representation is important and cannot be ignored, but it's just a vehicle to achieve your business goals. Today you complete sales for Brand A; if Brand A stops working with you, you can still complete tasks with Brand B. The reason behind this is your control over downstream channel outlets. Your true core competitiveness is your distribution and sell-through capabilities based on store control. Meeting the manufacturer's targets is just the win-win outcome, not the core capability in the process. 3. Where do owners spend their time? Distributors should reflect: In the past five years, where did your business growth come from? Was it from supermarket system channels, a specific brand, community group buying, or B2b? Wherever growth comes from, that's where owners should invest their time, energy, and focus. Many distributors say small and medium BC circulation stores are hard to develop; they tried once but failed after six months. The failure wasn't due to lack of experience but because they didn't invest time in this channel. Many distributors in snacks, condiments, and daily chemicals claim they can't handle circulation small and medium stores, but in reality, the owners didn't commit to this channel. Numerous successful distributor cases fully verify that even a single category like snacks, condiments, or daily chemicals can achieve direct control over circulation BC stores. 4. In 2023, New Distribution took many distributors to visit B2b platform distributors like Jiayun City and Rongcheng Yigou for learning tours. Many distributors wanted to transform in this direction. But when they thought about being a single-category distributor (condiments, snacks, or daily chemicals), they felt they lacked knowledge and resources for many categories. They needed over 3,000 SKUs but didn't know how to source or enter. Can a single category do B2b? My view: A B2b one-stop supply chain platform is a business model, and full-category product supply is the ultimate result. It's fine to start with snacks, daily chemicals, water/beverages, or condiments. The core is to form stable and lasting cooperative relationships with downstream circulation BC stores through a combination of multiple products. For a single daily chemical or condiment distributor, cooperating with downstream stores may not cover operating costs. Can you balance costs initially by combining condiments or daily chemicals with some best-selling beverages and convenient snacks? Stable and continuous cooperation with circulation BC stores is the first step to realizing a B2b supply chain platform. Initially, the product and category mix should be based on your past accumulated resources, not jumping straight to 3,000 SKUs across all categories. 5. Why does New Distribution insist that local regional distributors serve circulation stores? Because in the future, within a regional market (except first-tier cities), the "integration of distribution and retail" for local LKA supermarket chains is a definite trend. Chain supermarket systems may not need distributors. In an ordinary city, who needs distributors most in a distributor's territory? It must be independent supermarkets that cannot build their own supply chain systems. From 1,500-square-meter single supermarkets to 50-square-meter mom-and-pop stores, these stores need distributors to help build their product supply chains.